I will forever look at this game through rose-tinted glasses (so take my review with a ladle of salt). I remember playing its demo over and over when I was a 10-year old kid and Disciples was more or less the only game that would run on my computer. I played it again a few years ago and it still held up to the memory. Disciples is what got me to like turn-based mechanic. The game itself is pretty straight forward. You gather resources (at the end of each turn, based on resource producing spots - mines, crystals, etc - you own) and recruit units. Units can be levelled up when they gather enough EXP through battles. There are buildings you can raise and upgrade inside your main castle's walls that let you control the unit upgrade branches along with some status upgrades. You can also evolve towns you take over - this mostly entails paying for better walls, which gives the units behind them a better defence status boost when attacked. There's magic as well, that mainly works as support for your battling units. Those are built around one central character each (heroes, for lack of a better word), whose level and abilities directly influences how many companions they can have tag along. Each hero can have a certain number of buffing items equipped. Ant that's that. The rest is pretty much just a fun exploration into the fog of war. Plenty of playable races in there, with an okay story.
Full disclosure: played only on "normal" mode, the one where you need to fix the car and get the hell out of Dodge. I've never ever managed to complete the mission. I did however have a lot of fun while not completing it! Everything plays very tactical: find the best starting location, clean it up, barricade inside and set up traps, gather useful items from surrounding places etc. On of that there's the interaction between people in your party to take care of - let those get too bad and someone might end up with a broken leg... Fun, right? There's one thing that I noticed recently though: random events generator isn't always too fond of its own decisions. For instance: one of my characters gets left behind on the way to hospital, cause she had a broken leg. Two paragraphs down she's the one who lets the other 3 people into the hospital, even though they went ahead of her. Or that one time, where a character just died, then the diary went on to describe what she did and how. Still, the game is incredibly hard and gives you enough control to make you feel like on this next round, you'll definitely make a breakthrough. Fairly addictive and replayable (due to randomized everything). This game was an impulse buy, but I'm happy I bought it. Recommended!
Short & sweet, with myriad of mostly FF7 references. So go play that first, you don't want to get your story spoiled ;) Other than it's shortness, Evoland does exactly what it says: puts you through decades of evolution of the RPG genre in a matter of hours. I really wish they'd put in facts about certain playing aspects; when they first appeared, who implemented them and what was the overall reaction of the gaming community to those drastic gameplay changes. It'd make for a good interactive edutaiment - as it stands right now, Evoland is fun & weirdly nostalgic, with really good music (which is also playing on the FF7 nostalgia, it seems). Overall? As I said, short & sweet.
